Carl Barks (March 27, 1901 – August 25, 2000) was a famous Disney Studio illustrator and comic book creator, who invented Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck (1947), Gladstone Gander (1948), the Beagle Boys (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952) and Magica De Spell (1961). The quality of his scripts and drawings earned him the nick names The Duck Man and The Good Duck Artist. Fellow comic writer Will Eisner called him "the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books."

Austrian Artist Gottfried Helnwein curated and organized the first museum-exhibition of Carl Barks. Between 1994 and 1998 the retrospective was shown in 10 European Museums and seen by more than 400 000 visitors.

Erika Fuchs became famous in Germany due to her translations of American Walt Disney cartoons, especially Carl Barks's stories about Duckburg and its inhabitants. Unlike the English originals, the translations included many hidden quotes and literary allusions. As Erika Fuchs once said, "You can't be educated enough to translate comic books". Many of her creations entered the German language, such as the phrase "Dem Ingeniör ist nichts zu schwör" - "nothing is too hard for an engineer", but with the vowels at the end of "Ingenieur" and "schwer" altered to make them rhyme amusingly. She also used verbs shortened to their stem not only to imitate sounds (onomatopoeia), such as schluck, stöhn, knarr (gulp, groan, creak) but also to represent soundless events: grübel, staun (ponder, goggle). The word for these in German is now an "Erikative", named after her. Fuchs's creations are commonly used in Internet forums and chatrooms to describe what people are doing as they write.